The goal of a contact center is to run as efficiently as possible. In order to maximize efficiency and profitability, contact center managers need good information to make business decisions and predictions. With more accurate information, the contact center managers and administrators can make better decisions and react to changing conditions in real-time. Currently, contact center managers rely heavily on measures related to agent staffing and availability, such as, the number of agents staffed, the number of available agents, agent occupancy, and time spent on break. This information is also used to track agents for managing a specific type of skill. For example, a supervisor can view the number of agents currently handling calls for a specific type of product (i.e., a skill).
Today, this contact center information is hard to measure and aggregate because older contact center systems were designed for single locations that handled a relatively small number of skills. While it has long been possible to assign an agent to multiple skills, reporting for these types of contact centers is far less sophisticated than is needed today where a contact center could have hundreds or thousands of different skills, thousands of agents, and multiple locations. For large contact centers, it would be useful to know metrics for an entire group of skills, e.g., how many agents are staffed across all direct sales skills. Current systems have limitations for choosing multiple levels of detail in reporting. In addition, there are limits for getting near real-time information to allow an administrator to react quickly and appropriately to problems. While metrics are available for each individual skill, some key metrics cannot be directly rolled up into metrics at a skill group level. A skill group is a set of skills for which the contact center seeks to calculate overall metrics across those skills. For example, the contact center might want to know how many calls came in for tech support skills, how many agents were staffed in those skills, and how many agents were handling calls from those skills. When agents are assigned to support multiple skills at the same time, it is important to also be able to correctly track and manage this information in order to properly manage contact center resources. However, in current systems, when an agent is assigned to multiple skills within a skill group, the status of the agent in the skill group is either not available or incorrectly counted.